Sinful by Carolyn Faulkner Read Free Book Online

truck door slam and its engine roar to life.
    She had entered her apartment that night and collapsed on the couch in a heady combination of absolute fear, complete elation and a warmth she wasn’t at all sure wasn’t from shame. But it seemed a much more likely explanation for it might well have been that, for the first time in her life, she was feeling pure, sexual attraction to one Brandt Striker.
    And she wasn’t at all sure whether that was the best thing that ever happened to her, or potentially the worst.
    ***
    And, as their relationship progressed over the months, she was still in a quandary about which side of the fence she was going to come down on with him. She enjoyed their time together enormously, though. He was smart and funny and didn’t seem to care one whit that she was woefully ignorant of most of the conventional social memes. Lita – to her shame – was still having a hard time not thinking of sleeping with him before marriage as not being the worst result. Brandt had already told her, flat out, several months in, that he would never even consider marrying a woman he hadn’t had sex with. As he put it, “A lot of sex.”
    Lita, of course, wasn’t at all sure how to quantify sex, since she’d had so little of it even as a married woman.
    He’d continued to be marvelously patient with her, although he had insisted on some things that she had – to his pleasure – gone along with without much of a fight. He’d wanted to hold hands with her, and she was fine with that. He wanted to kiss her, and although she had misgivings about that, she let him, and then, since he was so annoyingly good at it, he had her asking him to kiss her, and, wickedly, teaching her how to initiate, which she found both tantalizing and horrifying.
    Apparently, though, most men liked it, and he certainly did. She knew because she’d asked him outright. He’d told her not to worry about asking him anything, that he was an open book, and that he’d be unhappy with her if he thought that she had a question she wasn’t asking him just because she was too embarrassed to do so.
    “Well, I don’t want you coming in and taking my genitals out to use on your own, but yeah, it’s a compliment to know that the woman I’m with wants me, too. Desire should be mutual.” She was still working on the “taking his genitals out to use on her own” part of the comment, he could see, and he was trying not to laugh at her horrified look.
    She was such a babe in the woods; she was, essentially, a virgin, and, in most ways, he found that to be powerfully attractive. Eventually, though, her hang-ups were either going to make them, or break them, because, although she didn’t know it yet, his patience – which had never been as infinite as he would prefer – was wearing a little thin. He wanted her, and they were seeing a lot of each other, but, on his sister’s advice, he was trying to let her set the pace of things, which meant that he was going home wanting every night, and that, frankly, was getting old.
    Things came to a head on her birthday. He had been teasing her with the idea of a surprise night, where she just had to put herself in his hands and let him take care of her. He picked her up early that morning and told her he’d take her anywhere, do anything with her all day. So they ended up haunting flea markets and Goodwills looking for bargains. He took her out to a movie in the early afternoon – that she considered quite racy but he knew to be relatively tame – and then to a light lunch at one of her favorite hole in the wall restaurants in the area.
    Laden with bags and boxes of assorted leftovers and the occasional trinket he’d bought her that she’d admired, he deposited her in his truck and drove to what he considered to be the highlight of the entire day. He’d rented them a suite at a hotel in Santa Fe, which was about two hours or so away, at a hotel that had palatially large rooms with indoor or outdoor